There are so many activities afoot at the moment that call me back to the Bush-the-Second Administration in which I served from 2001-2005, that it is positively eerie. Were I not possessed of the certain knowledge that we Americans don’t do history—we are, said Gore Vidal, “the United States of Amnesia”—I would think it more than eerie.
There’s John Bolton hovering around and sputtering on about how America needs to bludgeon its enemies, whether North Korea or Iran—and who’s so mad at the White House for not making him secretary of state that he has now labeled “Obama’s Iran deal” the “Trump-Obama deal”. There’s Nikki Haley, ultra-neocon-in-high-heels, pontificating at the United Nations (as Bolton did before her) about the same nuclear agreement with Iran and in the process telling more lies and half-truths than truths. There’s a President wearing a set of .45 caliber pistols and shooting them at everything that pops up—in the present case, including members of his own party like Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—only this time with bullets called “tweets”.
At the end of every day now I feel more and more respect for the administration in which I served because at least we had the coldly logical New York street-sense of Colin Powell so that even the morons and warmongers had to be cautious. Rex Tillerson, oil-man-of-Texas, could not rise to the sole tops of Powell’s street shoes.
And President Trump—well, what can one say? To fulfill a campaign promise to less than 25% of the American people—or less—he is about to decertify a nuclear agreement with Iran that is working well, to which six other countries are parties, which has the support of probably 85% or more of the security experts of all of these countries, plus Israel, and which, if used properly rather than scorned, could open the way to meaningful dialog about Iran’s ballistic missiles, sponsorship of Hezbollah, and destabilizing regional actions. One can only conclude that at the end of this movie, regime change in Iran is the only sought-after outcome, just as in Iraq in 2003. That means, just as in 2003 with Iraq, war. We are at the beginning of the same process we started in 2002, with the same characters, the same sheet of music, and the same instruments playing it—with a few exceptions like a three-year-old brat in the Oval Office.
Perhaps most blisteringly idiotic of all in this neocon-sponsored repeat-diorama-of-a-march-to-war, is the replacement of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), that bastion of lies, dissembling , propaganda and corruption over which Ahmed Chalabi presided, by the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), that group of savage-minded terrorists now informing us with certainty through that bastion of fair and balanced news, FOX TV, that Iran is cheating on the nuclear deal. Oh and, yes, this is the same MeK that previously was designated by the U.S. as a died-in-the-wool terrorist gang which is now, apparently, become trustworthy patriots or, to use that felicitous phrase of Ronald Reagan, “freedom fighters”. Indeed, the MeK gives new meaning to the aphorism that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. In this case, we—the United States—are both men simultaneously, an aptly absurd consummation for a country with a President who enacts policy by Tweet.
The MeK, re-christened nicely as the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or NCRI, tells us that “Iran’s nuclear weapons program has far from halted.” Referring to the group, FOX TV reports that “the Iranian Resistance [nice touch, that, sort of like La Résistance Francaise] has identified four major sites that ‘with a high degree of certainty’ have been involved in various aspects of the allegedly ongoing nuclear weapons project.” And like the Iraqi National Congress and its staunch advocate, Dick Cheney, the NCRI has its dupe—Newt Gingrich—to advocate powerfully for it.
As a sort of summary commentary, Jillian Mele of Fox News even said, “It appears [Iran’s] weapons program is fully operational” —perhaps not quite as bad as Dick Cheney’s “We know, with absolute certainty , that he [Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon….”, but Mele’s commentary will do. Perhaps these scurrilous rats have even learned a thing or two: note the use of such qualifying terms, for example, as “allegedly” and “it appears”. None of them seem “absolutely certain”.
Regardless of that touch of sophistication however, the huge question here is whether the American people will be so easily duped again, so readily led into yet another war. After some sixteen years of war, it seems almost perverse to set the nation up for another sixteen—and to allow the preachers for the first to be the preachers for the second. But perversity is these rats’ main game.
This time, though, what will the people say—and when will they say it?
Lawrence Wilkerson was chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002-2005.